Five years ago this evening, my mother died unexpectedly. I got one of the phone calls that you never want to get, and joined what my sister now calls “the club that nobody wants to be in.” At the time, I wrote a bunch of blog posts about it. That turns out to have been . . . → Read More: Five years

Back in the day, I had a Livejournal blog where I kept in touch with a few dozen friends and acquaintances. I used it to push out updates that I thought people might find interesting, when they had the time to read. I used to post about once a day. Reading back through those posts . . . → Read More: The undocumented years

I work with computers for a living. Here are some of the tools that I use all the time:

Macbook Pro: I’ve used a Macbook Pro as my primary workstation since they were introduced, and I haven’t looked back. I’ve had one significant hardware issue in all that time, and Apple fixed it for me . . . → Read More: Tools I Use

This weekend I spent three days at PAX East. PAX stands for the Penny Arcade Expo. PAX is a convention / exhibition of games and gamers. It’s also something of a movable-feast nerd mecca. This year, like last year, it was at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center (BCEC) – the biggest venue in town . . . → Read More: Of PAX and the Greater Internet

I find it difficult to select charitable organizations to support with either my dollars or my time. Everybody has a hand out. Federal “not for profit” status is no indicator of good intent, much less effective action in the world. Neither is appearing in the news any kind of a clue about whether or not . . . → Read More: Decent Charities

I was reading Matt Taibbis most recent blog post, and I feel moved to build on his points.

America is losing its competitive edge. There are a lot of reasons for that, but one if them is almost certainly the fact that we pay our highest wages in nonproductive sectors like banking, and to . . . → Read More: Cultural re-alignment

Jessica Alqhuist is a student at West Cranston High School in RI. I’ve written about her before. She’s the one who noticed that her school still displayed its “School Prayer” (a relic from the 50’s) on a large banner (a relic from the 60’s) in the auditorium. Initially, the prayer was a mandatory daily recitation . . . → Read More: Prayer banner, redux

At the end of each year I make a little summary post listing the first (interesting) line from the first post of each month. What I note this year is that I basically stopped writing as of September, and also that I seem to have spent a lot of time pissed off about various things. . . . → Read More: 2011 Retrospective